Re-Reading the Landscape: Place and Identity in NE Australia During the Late Holocene

Abstract

Through an examination of land use during the late Holocene, this article explores the changing nature of place and identity in what is today Djungan country (NE Australia). We begin with the notion that use of place is mediated by historically positioned systems of meaning. We further contend that through praxis (as social practice), experience of place participates in the structuring and construction of identity. By examining changes in the way a distinctive mountain — Ngarrabullgan (Mt Midligan) — has been incorporated within the broader socio-cultural landscape through time, we conclude that major alterations took place in peoples’ relations to their surroundings, and by implication in the construction of landscapes, life experiences and identity, around the fourteenth century AD. This has implications for the way we project ethnographic details, attuned to Dreaming-based ontological views of the world, into the more distant past.